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Touchscreens in select cars can now become iPhone extensions via CarPlay, Apple’s attempt to extend its influence into vehicle cabins. Alas, Julio Ojeda-Zapata found CarPlay to be a dumbed-down and glitchy experience.

Many iCloud Music Library and iTunes Match users are finding that their iOS devices are downloading music without their knowledge. Kirk McElhearn explains how to prevent this before it could leave you with an enormous data bill.

Thinking about visiting national parks in the United States this year? The Chimani National Parks app provides an overview of all the units in the National Park System, and 19 individual apps provide maps and information about the most popular parks.

If you have a new iPhone 6s or 6s Plus, are you familiar with Apple’s new “3D Touch” gesture? It’s like Force Touch on an Apple Watch, but where Force Touch is associated with the entire screen, 3D Touch is connected with a particular interface element. And where Force Touch presents a menu for the watch screen you’re looking at, 3D Touch can provide either a quick-actions view or a peek-and-pop content preview, both of which are contextual to where you made the 3D Touch. In a post from late last year, Raluca Budiu of Nielsen Norman Group explains the benefits of 3D Touch, and while acknowledging the significant challenges the new gesture faces, she encourages iOS developers to support the feature so we users have a chance to learn it — if too few apps support 3D Touch, we will be disappointed too many times to build the gesture into our usage patterns.

The notion of an iPad as a productivity device is hardly new, but Apple’s tablets have been hampered by cramped screens, flaky add-on keyboards, and a lack of a decent stylus for those doing visual work. The new iPad Pro sweeps away these problems but is neither perfect nor cheap.

Apple has updated iOS to 9.2, with improvements to iBooks, Apple Music, and Apple News, as well as the addition of the Mail Drop attachment feature to Mail and support for the new Lightning to SD Card Camera Reader.

Dropbox has announced that it’s shutting down Carousel, its photo management app, on 31 March 2016 and Mailbox, its suite of email apps, on 26 February 2016. Dropbox said that it will integrate features from both apps into its core cloud storage offering. Carousel was an original creation of Dropbox in 2014 and at least made some sense, while Mailbox was an independent app that was acquired by Dropbox in 2013 for reasons that were never clear. The moral of the story for Dropbox? Stick to your knitting, or in this case, file sharing and document collaboration.

With a software update, Ford has brought Siri Eyes Free support to vehicles equipped with the second-generation MyFord Touch system. In other words, if you have the right Ford, you’ll now be able talk directly to your iPhone through your car.

A number of iPad Pro users have reported that, after charging, their tablets stop responding and show only a black screen. Apple says that it’s investigating the issue, but in the meantime the company recommends forcing a restart if your iPad Pro is locked up, which you can do by holding the Sleep/Wake and Home buttons until you see an Apple logo.

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NetNewsWire was the king of Apple-centric RSS readers long ago, but has lately been overshadowed by the likes of Feedly and Reeder. Now, publisher Black Pixel has revived the newsreader app for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and even the Apple TV. But these apps feel like also-rans in their current forms.

The new Live Photos feature in the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus transforms pictures into mini videos, but these creations can be shared only with other iOS and Mac users (and not even always then). Turning Live Photos into animated GIFs allows for a wider audience.

When Apple pushes out major new operating systems, we at Take Control concentrate on discovering and documenting Apple’s changes. Our current batch of new titles looks at El Capitan and iOS 9, along with sub-topics like iCloud, Apple Mail, Photos, troubleshooting, networking, and more.

For many of us, the dimmest brightness setting on the iPhone and iPad is still too bright, especially in dark rooms. Fortunately, Justin Searls has a tip on how to use the Zoom accessibility setting to lower the brightness below the lowest setting. After setting it up, you can dim the screen with a triple-press of the Home button.

It turns out that Apple has two suppliers for the A9 chip that powers the new iPhone 6s and 6s Plus — Samsung and TSMC — and the chipmakers rely on different process technologies. Some benchmarks have shown that iPhones using the TSMC A9 chip are more efficient than Samsung’s A9 chip, resulting in longer battery life. Apple has now weighed in on the controversy, telling TechCrunch that the difference in real-world use is just 2–3 percent, nothing that anyone would notice in actual usage and well within the tolerances that Apple would accept for any device.